


Confinement

by Nottherealdean



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, Forced Pregnancy, Mpreg, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 10:08:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6749281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nottherealdean/pseuds/Nottherealdean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amara's freedom isn't complete until she takes the time to create the body she's been using, and she needs Dean to do it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Confinement

“Dean.”

Dean startled into wakefulness. Amara’s voice often haunted his dreams, pulling him into nightmares, but this was different. It was always different when she was near him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, sitting up. He grabbed his robe and put it on over his t-shirt.

“I need something.” She was smiling, but there was a hint of uncertainty in her eyes. “And it can only come from you.”

“Whatever it is, I don’t—” Dean pulled the robe tighter and eased back further on his bed, away from her, as he spoke.

“I need it,” she repeated, her smile falling apart. “This is something I have to do, and I… I think I should do it now.”

“What is is?” His dread was strong enough to clench his stomach, but, as ever, an unnatural calm was trying to settle over him and make his thoughts irrelevant. He sought for a defense anyway. The knife under his pillow would shatter as the previous one had, and the guns—if he even could get one aimed at her before she stopped him—were likely to do nothing more than make his ears ring. Calling for Sam was out of the question; he would have no better options than Dean, and Amara might kill him if he rushed in regardless. She had already killed Cas in order to get what she wanted.

“It won’t take long,” she said, in a reassuring tone, and raised her hand.

Dean was half-lying in an open meadow, Amara kneeling on the ground in front of him as she had been at the side of his bed. Grass and wildflowers rose tall around him, and the sky was blue, almost cloudless, with a warm sun shining down. It had been night, at the bunker.

Dean stood, casting around the landscape for any sign of where he was. Gentle hills rolled up all around, and behind them mountains. A small cabin was tucked among a stand of trees at one edge of the meadow, but it was the only sign that anyone had ever set foot there.

––

“Amara,” Dean said, and she could see the fear in his face, “What are you doing?”

“I need to have a body,” she explained. “I need to be born.”

“You already have a body.”

“Yes, but we have to make it.” He was shaking his head, confused and wary, and she tried to explain. “If I had done it when I escaped, I wouldn’t have been able to grow as quickly as I needed. I would have been vulnerable for too long.” Her fear had been that her brother might capture her again, but she knew now that even the angels might have been able to weaken her far too badly, if they had struck before she had recovered some of her power. “I had to put it off until I could do it safely.”

“What do you mean?” Dean asked. “You… what? Grew up in a meatsuit your future self brought back for you?”

“Yes. And now it’s time,” she said.

He took a step back from her.

“This has to happen, Dean, the result is already here.” She put a hand to her chest, the skin and flesh and bone that let her walk free. “There’s no point in waiting any longer.”

“I’m not doing that with you,” he insisted. “I’m not having sex with you.”

“That’s not what I need,” she said, realizing he hadn’t understood. It was a justified concern, she admitted to herself, because until the moment he’d flinched back from her kiss, she had indeed planned on using sex as her means. “I need you to give birth to me.”

“ _What?_ ”

“You bore the Mark. It has to be you.”

“Oh, there is something you’re not getting here,” Dean said, “That’s not going to work. I can’t, uh, give birth. To you or anyone else. That’s not…” He trailed off in a loss for words.

“You can if I want you to. Adding a few organs is easy. I could have done that the moment I was free. It was feeding myself was the problem.”

Dean raised a hand protectively to his stomach. “And if I say no?”

She felt a pang of guilt, and wished he wasn’t fighting it. “It’s already done. I conceived myself when I brought you here.”

 

***

 

The cabin was small, clean, and comfortable. It had an outhouse, and a generator to power the single ancient-looking lamp and the coffee maker he’d insisted Amara bring from the bunker along with his clothes. His other demand—demands that they both knew he had no leverage whatsoever to make—was a message left on Sam’s phone.

“Hey Sam,” Dean said, turned away from Amara to keep himself under control. He needed Sam as calm as possible. The thought of a new disaster, another reckless plan undertaken in desperation and leading to something worse, was unbearable. “Amara… got me. I’m going to be fine, so just—just ride this one out, okay? I’ll be back in about a week. Don’t do anything stupid.”

He hung up, and Amara let the signal she’d created for him drop. He started at the useless screen of his phone, before turning it off.

“Are you going to stay and keep an eye on me the whole time?” he asked.

“No, I’ve hidden this valley. Angels can’t even see it. We’ll both be safe from them, without me here.”

“And what about me?” He turned to face her. “What if I shut off baby’s incubator?” He had a feeling that the answer was still no, and asking was nothing more than a futile gesture at grasping control. But futile was the only kind of protest he had left.

Amara looked sad, to Dean’s satisfaction and anger, but she didn’t yield. “You won’t be able to hurt me, Dean, no matter how hard you try. The knife won’t scratch your skin, with me inside you.”

She left him then, but the compulsion that ground away at his mind didn’t go with her.

 

***

 

Dean was sitting on the top of one of the hills when Amara appeared the next day. There was nothing beyond the valley other than more hills, and mountains, and meadows nestled between them.

“I brought something,” she said, and held out a paper bag. He took it, and, however unhappy he looked, he ate the cheeseburger without hesitation. “I have something for me, too,” she added. His chewing slowed.

“What?” He sounded wary and reluctant.

“Power. Without it, this would take almost the full nine months.” He looked queasy at that, and set his cheeseburger down.

Amara gathered up strength and put her hand on his cheek to hold him steady. Power streamed out of her mouth and blazed in the air between them, before sliding between Dean’s lips.

He sat still, with his eyes closed, for a moment. “So, what? You’ve been out hunting, sucking up souls to feed to Junior?”

Amara shook her head. “I’ve been searching for God.”

“Yeah, good luck with that.”

“The souls I’ve consumed were hunting for me. Demons, working for Lucifer.” They thought they could recover their master, but she had no intention of letting him back out. Although her torture and eventual consumption of him had failed to draw God out, it had been some measure of repayment. She remembered Lucifer. She thought he had earned his suffering.

“You put demons inside of me?” Dean asked.

“No, I drew it from them, but,” she sought out a word to describe it, “filtered it, to make it easier for her. And for you.”

“Well, thanks for that.” His tone was biting. She didn’t blame him, for all that she didn’t understand why he was resisting their shared destiny. She had chosen the valley as a shelter, but it could as easily be described as a cage. She didn’t know what to do about that.

Dean spoke again, more quietly. “It’s… not going to eat its way out, is it? Or are you going to cut—”

“No,” Amara cut him off, startled by the question and the fear bleeding into his voice when he asked it. “No, I wouldn’t do that. You’ll grow a birth canal when you need it.” She felt an urge to explain herself, to try to make it seem better to him. “I knew you might not like what I had to do, and I thought it might be—easier,” she shrugged, unhappy with how inadequate it sounded when she said it aloud, “if I started with as few changes to you as I could.”

Dean seemed to find it a weak reprieve as well. It was an uncomfortable thought, to realize how small a mercy it was, but worse yet was seeing it as a mercy at all. It made facing the fact that she was hurting him unavoidable.

 

***

 

There was a slight swell to his stomach when he went to bed, the extra space of his body undeniable when he bent over to unlace his boots. He tried not to think about it as he lay sleepless in the dark cabin, alone except for the rustle of something in the roof and the creature growing inside him.

By morning, the curve of his belly had become bigger. It came too close to the table when he drank his coffee; it caught in the corner of his eye while he scrubbed the mug viciously clean. It forced itself into his awareness in a distortion of himself that he couldn’t ignore.

As the day wore on, it warped his body further. It grew slow enough that the change crept up on him until something jarred it back to the forefront of his mind, but quickly enough that in those horrified moments, he imagined he could feel his skin stretching to accommodate it. 

A hunger began to open up inside him, one that resisted every box of macaroni and cheese he made and wolfed down. It wasn’t, he knew, _his_ hunger. It was Amara, using up the power of the soul she had fed herself, and wanting more. He was left waiting for her return, and the tingling burn of another soul running down his throat and fading away. 

–– 

She came in the middle of the day, when the sun was beating down hot enough for Dean to be sweating in the shade of the trees. She thought he would be more comfortable without his coat, but for some reason he was wearing it anyway.

Amara was pleased when she saw the swell of her progress under the layers of fabric; she was growing quicker than she had hoped. It would only take a few more days, and then she would be safely born. Dean would be free to leave the valley, and free of carrying her as well.

She had had such high expectations of the experience, an assumption that it would be a joyful merging of mind and body that would bring new heights to the peace she felt around him. That it would be bliss. Even when he had tried to kill her—the first time and the second—she hadn’t understood that he meant it. It was seeing him recoil, the hurt on his face when he pulled back from her and the way he wiped his mouth in revulsion, that had begun to make her doubt. She’d gone to him as soon as she had admitted that being pregnant with her would be a trial for him, something he would have to endure rather than delight in. She had been aware enough to know she was still only guessing at how unhappy he would be, and selfish enough to prefer saving herself the greater guilt that would come with thinking on it further before she started. There was no way out of doing it, after all. She had found a form when she first met Dean, rushing through the newly-opened passage from her prison, and to complete her escape she had to manifest it.

Now she smiled at him, glad that she would soon be born, and that it would be the end of him looking so miserable. He frowned harder.

“It won’t be long now,” she told him, wanting to reach out and dissolve away the emotions troubling him. She could make him completely happy, if she pulled his soul into herself to join the others.

“This is taking less time than I thought,” she said, but he looked sickened at the news.

“Let’s get this over with,” he said. He took a step closer to her, and Amara cupped his cheek with her hand. She let a soul separate itself from the warm ball of energy inside her, and guided it into his mouth. He looked relieved, and she decided to come earlier the next day. She would have to feed herself more, to stave off her gestating self’s hunger from tugging ineffectively at his soul.

“You were planning this all along,” Dean said, more a statement than a question.

“How I would be born?”

He nodded, a short, stiff movement.

“Not the details, but, yes. It always had to be you.”

“Then why did you kiss me?” He looked uncomfortable, in a different way from the frustrated anger at her arrival. “If you knew I’d be—” He struggled with the words. “That you’re my daughter?”

“I don’t have parents,” she said, surprised. “I just am.”

“But…”

“You’re giving birth to my body. I’m who I’ve always been.” It wasn’t, she realized as she said it, entirely true. She was different from who she was before she was trapped, or in the ages she spent in her cell. She had changed, starting from the moment she stood at last in the black, billowing ruins of her prison, and she was still in flux now.

“Anyway, human rules don’t apply to me,” she said. “They don’t need to apply to you either,” she added when she realized that might be what had made him pull back from her. She hadn’t thought he would need to be told that, with the strength of the connection between them so obvious, so encompassing. But then, she had made several assumptions that hadn’t been true.

“No. No, I’m not into that,” he said, and the tone of his voice crushed her quickly-blooming hope that this might solve the problem. It was a disappointment, but one she was starting to come to terms with.

 

***

 

Dean worried about what Sam might be doing. It was a way of taking his mind off the stranglehold on his body, how the air he breathed and the food he ate was being siphoned off to the lump curled inside his belly. He didn’t have to think about the souls being devoured through him. He could get closer to feeling like it was a normal crisis.

He found it was easier, too, for fear to cut through the pressure on his thoughts the less it had to do with Amara. Her hand on his face, her body taking over his from the inside out: he could recognize what was happening and how truly helpless he was against it, but the bond between them deadened the emotion under an artificial calm. He knew he was terrified, but it was distanced from himself. Before, it would all come rushing back when she left or sent him away. Now, forced into her proximity at all times, he couldn’t escape the feeling of himself being molded, squeezed into something that suited the connection. The anxiety of what Sam might do, making it through the suppression of the bond mostly intact, was a strange relief. He could feel it, and that was about as close as he could get to feeling the fear he ought to have a right to.

Dean fretted over it while he lay sleepless in bed, as the sun crept up over the window sill in golden streaks, and as he changed from the clothes he’d slept in to ones cold from spending the chilly night wedged into the tiny nightstand next to his bunk. Sam could have tried for help from Billie and made a deal that would cost him his life, or he might be about to release Michael the same way he almost freed Lucifer—the way Cas had freed Lucifer. He might have resorted to working with Rowena and the Book of the Damned again.

He was dredging the bottom of the barrel of terrible scenarios, and thinking about Sam turning to the Leviathan, as he pulled his t-shirt down over his stomach the best he could. Soon, he’d run out of distractions, and have to resort to focusing on the least-horrifying aspect of his current situation.

 

***

 

“I tried to stop it,” Dean said, after Amara had fed herself two souls in quick succession. “I tried to keep you locked up in that place forever.” 

“I don’t care,” Amara answered. “It was you—you were my way out. The door that kept me imprisoned, and the one that set me free.” She smiled, almost euphoric at the memory of the first moments of escape. “Who opened you, or why—it’s not important to me. You are.”

Dean shook his head.

“But why?” he asked. “Why am I so important? Why are we… bound?”

“You’re my gateway,” she said again, trying to explain something that seemed so obvious to her. “How could we not be? I came into this world through you.” The connection between them, that drew her to him and filled her with quiet, numbing peace, felt natural, inevitable, and she still struggled to believe it didn’t feel the same to him. “That’s why I need this.” She gestured at the curve of his stomach. “It has to be your body that gives birth to mine.”

“But…”

Amara searched for another way to say it. It was the angel Ambriel’s knowledge that she resorted to, the swirl of her grace a pool of memories that Amara—first almost idly and then by turns fascinated and disgusted—had dipped into once she had regained her strength after the angels’ onslaught.

“When you were in Hell,” she started, and Dean flinched. It was a bare, unguarded motion, and Amara worried that she had misjudged. She didn’t know how to recover, however, except to press on in the hope that it would work anyhow. “The angels didn’t care who broke you, or how hard you fought against it. All that mattered was that you were the first seal, and you were broken.” Dean looked pained, and this close to him, making an effort to bring them to an understanding, she could feel an echo of it herself. Fear, pain, and guilt. The urge to take it away from him came back, stronger than ever.

“What you wanted, it doesn’t change what you are to me. What I am to you.” The ache still resonated inside her. “I’m sorry it hurts you.” It was worse, now, than if she hadn’t tried to explain at all.

“This thing between us,” Dean said, sounding like he already knew the answer, “you can’t get rid of it, can you?”

“No. Even with my brother working beside me, there are some things that can’t be erased. And the coward won’t face me, let alone try to undo what his betrayal did.”

“It won’t go away after… you know.”

“After I’m born? No, that won’t weaken our bond.” She had stripped away his last-ditch hope, she realized, and she didn’t have anything to offer that could replace it. She accepted their bond, _wanted_ it. He didn’t, and wouldn’t, unless she did to him something that he would see as an even greater violation.

“I won’t use you like the angels did,” she promised, and she could hear the guilt in her own voice. “Not after this.”

 

***

 

He went into labor on the fifth day, in the evening. It started with a dull pain, low in his stomach, that faded almost as soon as he was forced to admit it was there. When it came again, he was caught between dread and sick relief. He wanted his ordeal to be over, and this—terrifying as it was—was the only way he would get out of it. Amara had proven her will inescapable. He would give birth to her, and then she would be out of him and he could leave. Still, though, his mind recoiled, and he tried not to think about it or his body—that she’d already bent to her purpose—shifting to accommodate her even further.

Amara came when he was lying sweaty on the bed, his hand gripping the beam of the bed frame.

“It won’t be long,” she promised, but he had reached the point where that was nearly meaningless. Every minute was intolerable after days of being unable to get away from her and the effect she had on him, while she lived beneath his skin.

“I can take the pain away,” she said, putting her hand next to his on the bed frame. He shook his head, jaw clenched tight.

“No. Don’t do anything to me,” he said, once the contraction passed.

She knelt on the floor next to him and waited in silence, while Dean tried to keep his mind empty, away from the reality of what was happening. The ache that came in steadily increasing waves was an insistent reminder, until it crested and pushed aside everything else. He groaned, and a movement in the corner of his eye made him grab out.

He felt warm skin, and it was an anchor against the pain and the short flash of memory that still so often came when he hurt badly enough. The chains and crackling clouds of Hell; the feeling of his body at the mercy of something impossibly stronger than him, that wasn’t merciful.

 ––

 Amara looked down at his white-knuckled fist, his grimacing face, and felt his misery like weight on her chest. He shouldn’t be holding on to her like she was his only comfort, she thought. She wasn’t that, to him.

She moved her self back in time, to the midst of a blaze of fire. She ignored the flames trying vainly to consume her, and held out her arms. The body fell into them, char and ash disappearing into living flesh. She brought it forward to the moment she had left, the corpse draped across her lap and Dean still clinging to her arm. She flung out a net of power, stretching it as far as she could. It caught, out beyond where she was starting to lose hope, and she drew it in and funneled the soul into its body.

“He needs you,” Amara told Mary, when she stirred and struggled to sit up. She pushed herself off of Amara’s lap, looking confused and afraid. “Here,” Amara said, impatient with the tension of her birth and Dean’s distress.

 ––

 A hand took Dean by the wrist, and easily pulled his hand from the arm he’d clung to. A sharper surge of pain rolled through him, and he felt fingers interlace with his.

“Dean?” a long-remembered voice asked. It cut through the hot burn of pain and the fear boiling under the dead weight of the bond, and Dean turned his head to see his mother. She was crouched by the side of the bed, wearing the white nightdress he’d seen on her as a ghost, and as a vision of Zachariah’s in Heaven. Her hand was solid, though, holding on tight to his, and she felt real, alive.

“Mom?”

“It’s going to be okay, sweetheart,” she said, and another contraction hit him. He squeezed her hand harder, hanging on for all he was worth. He could feel something start to come out. 

––

 Amara could see her own head, and then—quickly, because she wanted herself to be out too, and she didn’t think Dean’s request barred nudging herself along—her shoulders and the rest of her. Eagerly, she ripped open the thin membrane still encasing her, and watched herself take her first breath.

“It’s okay,” Mary said over and over, while Amara lifted herself free of the amniotic sac. Dean was still looking at Mary like she was the open door of a prison, and Mary was looking down at him with a shaken smile, clearly lost but trying to comfort him.

“See?” Mary said, when Amara held herself cradled in her arms. “It’s… fine. It looks fine.” Then, in a tone of forced cheer, “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“She’s me,” Amara answered, her escape finally completed. At last, she was out of her cell fully and—with her strength safely secured—for all time. It wasn’t as wild a joy as she had expected, shot through as it was with what it had cost Dean and what her continued freedom meant for him, but it was an almost dizzying relief. The only thing left unfinished was taking herself back to the hospital near where she had escaped, and exchanging herself for the stillborn child being delivered there. It would be the act that laid all of creation at her feet, that proved there was no one who could prevent her from doing as she pleased. No one who had the power to stop her would have let her get so far.

––

 Dean could feel Amara’s presence still weighing down on him and the ache of his body, but he was fixated on Mary. She was there, after the pain and memory of Hell faded, and he thought that must mean she wasn’t a hallucination.

“Mom,” he said. “You’re real? This isn’t…” He trailed off, but she bit her lip, nodding. She leaned down to hug him, pressing her cheek to the crown of his head.

“It’s me,” she said, sounding like she was crying. She kissed his forehead and pulled away enough to look at him. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m so glad to see you again.”

“Me too,” Dean said. About to say more, a shock like an explosion going off went through him. Stunned, he could barely hear Mary speaking, saying something about seeing him at a house and a spirit. There was a yawning gulf inside him, a space where before there had been pressure steadily squeezing him into nothing. It was a breathless, weightless moment of emptiness, and then a rush refilling him. Everything that had been suppressed was coming back in a wild surge of emotion. It was too much for him to do anything but feel it in one tangled mess of fear and anger, with a wave of relief and hope mounting in response.

Amara had left. After days unable to escape her, she was finally gone and he was free at last. His mind and body were his again. Almost instinctively he hugged Mary close, hanging on to her as the rising tide of joy crested inside him. Even his pent-up anger and fear had a bright tinge to it. They were his—rightfully, deservedly—and he had them back.

He could hear Mary’s voice, back to telling him it would be okay, over the sound of his own rough breathing. He hugged her tighter for a heartbeat.

“I missed you,” he said, shakily, his voice muffled by her shoulder.

“Dean, honey—” She was cut off by the sound of his gasp, as he was once more crushed by the force of the bond between him and Amara.

Dean was frozen, briefly, by shock and a muted, endless dread. He didn’t think he had any strength left to gather up, but he knew it was inevitable, so he turned to see her anyway.

Amara was standing near the foot of the bed, hands streaked with watery blood and an expression of sadness on her face. Anger, held back from him by the strength of the bond, seethed distantly.

“I’ll take you back,” she said. Dean panicked at the thought that he would lose Mary another time, before Amara continued and he realized she meant him. “I can leave you alone, now.”

She raised a stained hand. “Goodbye, Dean.” She started to curl her fingers, then hesitated. “I’m sorry.”

She completed the gesture, and Dean found himself, still gripped firmly in Mary’s arms, in darkness. The terrible pressure of Amara was gone, again, and he could recognize the familiar feel of the mattress, the silence of a room insulated from the outside world by thick concrete walls. Mary held him closer, her breath coming fast in his ear, and he started crying.


End file.
